The updated Information Is Beautiful Graph

2
Posted 07 May 2012 — by
Category Pay outs

You may have seen the graph showing how much streams/sales an artist needs to earn US monthly minimum wage? The one with the big pink bubbles? The information is rather outdated, but people keep referring to it. Spotify pays more per stream now. I have asked Information Is Beautiful to update the graph. No response so far, so I took the liberty of updating it myself. Time to let some air out.

I decided to focus on the revenues for Indie Artists because I honestly don’t know what percentage labels pass on to their artists. Here is the result:

So Rhapsody offers a better deal? Maybe. But take in mind that Rhapsody has about 1 million users. Spotify has over 10 million active users, so chances of earning a minimum wage from Spotify streams are ten times as high I guess.

I will try to keep the graph updated, so stay tuned.

 

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The Spotify iPad app: nice but no real surprises

0
Posted 04 May 2012 — by
Category hardware

Spotify finally has an iPad app. It was a long wait that made expectations grow. Was it worth the wait?

The app has a nice set of features:

  • Retina graphics for iPad
  • Browse the catalogue with instant search
  • ‘Now Playing’ full-screen view with high-definition cover art
  • Search for playlists, users and music
  • Check out what’s hot and find trending playlists & songs amongst your friends
  • Inbox grouped by user for easy searching
  • Gapless playback and crossfade
  • AirPlay integration

No real surprises but the way your playlists and folders are displayed is a big improvement. This makes the desktop client look outdated.

But if you were expecting the famous Spotify Apps to be part of the iPad app I have to disappoint you. Even Artist and Album Radio is missing.

Missed opportunities

The iPad is a great device for exploring music. But you probably will not keep staring to the album cover for as long as the album plays. Personally I like to read the lyrics, the album review or the credits. The iPad App could become the enhanced version of the LP cover or CD Booklet. I was hoping for something like an improved version of the The Complete Collection Spotify App on the iPad. But you still have to search for these vital extra information yourself.

Well, there is always something left to be desired. As for the rest, a nice app, far better than having the blown up version of the iPhone on your iPad.

 

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Classify app makes album sales rize 50%

0
Posted 25 Apr 2012 — by
Category Spotify

X5 Music Group released some information Tuesday that shows the positive impact its new Spotify app, called Classify, has had on its download sales.

Billboard.biz reports:

X5 points to the following statistics for “The 50 Greatest Pieces of Classical Music” after the launch of Classify: album sales rose about 50% and the title reached #1 on iTunes Classical bestsellers while average daily streams from the album increased 830% from the prior month. The company says no additional marketing or promotions existed that would muddy these results. Their conclusion, and it seems to be the right one based on this limited information, is greater awareness at Spotify resulted in an increase in purchased downloads elsewhere.

These results are probably a best-case scenario and won’t necessarily be duplicated by other albums featured in Classify. Curious about the app’s impact on other titles, I asked X5′s publicist why the company chose to highlight the success of this album in particular. I was told “The 50 Greatest” got prime real estate on the Classify app and is a high-profile release, “so it illustrates the app’s promotional value most clearly.”

“The recent sales spike for ’50 Greatest Pieces of Classical Music’ follows the same trend we have seen in Sweden, where there is a positive correlation between Spotify streaming and digital sales,” X5 CEO and co-founder Johan Lagerlof said in a statement. “We have known for some time that streaming services do not cannibalize sales from traditional music outlets, and this growth makes that even more clear.”

 

Major upgrade to the Spotify Soundrop App

0
Posted 17 Apr 2012 — by
Category Apps, Spotify

Soundrop is one of the most popular Spotify Apps. A great place to hangout and just listen or vote up or add your favorite music and chat about it.

What’s new:

  • The “track not available in your region” issue is fixed. No more silence, Soundrop picks another track from the upcoming list which is close to the same length.
  • When you open a room, you can set it as either “open” (everyone can add tracks) or “curated”. Visitors of a curated room can only vote. The user who started the room control the playlist.
  • You can now customize your room with own picture and room name, and you can tag it so others can easily find it. Great for bands to connect with their (future) fans.
  • If you want to search for rooms, simply use the search field on the main Soundrop lobby to find rooms by name or tag.
  • Improved chat, you can now resize the chat area and also ignore users.
  • When you sign in with Facebook, you can see when your friends are on Soundrop in in which room.

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Not on Spotify? Try Tomahawk: autocomplete for Spotify

2
Posted 15 Apr 2012 — by
Category Spotify

Don’t you just hate the holes in the Spotify catalog? I don’t understand why some artists and labels are still refusing to release their music on Spotify. Overall streaming revenues are growing fast, so that should not be the problem anymore.

Nevermind, there is a solution now, a new program called Tomahawk. This program combines the catalogs of Spotify, YouTube, Grooveshark, SoundCloud, Last.fm, Dilandau, Jamendo, 4Shared, Exfm and many more in to one big cloud of music.

Missing tracks in your playlist?
Is your Spotify playlist suddenly incomplete because of tracks that have been pulled by the label? Tomahawk replaces the missing tracks by a version on one of the other services. Your playlist will still be complete.

Track not available in your country?
Tomahawk will load the track from another service.

Playlist with local files?
Import the playlist in Tomahawk and you will be able to listen to the local files as well!

Artist or album not on Spotify?
You will not find Pink Floyd, The Beatles or the El Camino album by The Black Keys on Spotify. No problem. Tomahawk will track down these albums on one of the other services, and you will still be able to listen.

Sounds great doesn’t it? Let me demonstrate how it works.

Go to www.tomahawk-player.org, download and install the program. (Windows, OS X,  Linux).

Tomahawk uses Resolvers to enable playback from the streaming services. First you have to install the resolvers for the services you would like to use.

Go to Settings -> Configure Tomahawk and click Resolvers->Get more resolvers.

The Spotify resolver requires a Spotify premium account. If you don’t have premium, Tomahawk can still be of use so don’t quit yet.

Tomahawk for OS X includes the Spotify resolver. Windows Vista/7 an Linux users currently need to download a separate Spotify Resolver. Follow instructions on this page

Install the Spotify Resolver, then click the small wrench to open the configuration menu where you enter your Spotify account credentials. Don’t forget to check “High Quality Streaming”as well.

Now install a few other Resolvers like YouTube, Last.fm. Make sure you also add Dilandau, This service turned out the be the number one supplier for missing tracks.

Another great source is VK.com (Vkontakte). This service has millions of tracks. There is no official resolver for Vkontakte yet but you can download this zip file. Unpack and add the vkontakte-resolver.js. So go to Settings -> Configure->Resolvers click the  “+” button and select the “vkontakte-resolver.js“ file.

Important!
Now that you installed the Resolvers, restart Tomahawk to make sure all resolvers are activated. Use Controls->Quit to prevent Tomahawk from remaining active on the background.

Ok now we are set to go!

Album not on Spotify
Let’s try an album that is not on Spotify. I will show you another great feature of Tomahawk in the process.

Go the the Charts section. You will find all kinds of charts. Just browse around.

There it is! Famous for not being on Spotify El Camino by The Black Keys. Now watch what happens when you double click this album:

All tracks ready to be played, delivered by Dilandau and Vkontakte.

Playlist with tracks that have been pulled from Spotify

Let’s use the Daily Indie Playlist


Lots of tracks are missing. Let’s solve this with Tomahawk. Click New Playlist -> Create Manual Playlist

Now drag and drop the playlist to Tomahawk.

And watch what happens!

Playlist with tracks from various sources
One other example. A playlist from We Are Hunted created with the Tomahawklet.

The playlist with tracks on Spotify, my own collection and Vkontakte. Isn’t this great?

And this is just the start. Tomahawk has a lot more to offer like:

  • listen to the music on your friends computers
  • build a SuperCollection from your and your friends collections
  • import playlists from various services and websites
  • Footnotes with Top songs, related artists and Wikipedia info
  • and much much more…

Just watch a few of the videos made by one of the creators of this incredible program. You will be surprised.

And you know what the good part is? Maybe Tomahawk helps to drive more artists and labels to Spotify. They get paid for the streams provided by Spotify and probably not for streams delivered by most other services.

 

 

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Spotify adds web widget for songs, albums and playlists

0
Posted 11 Apr 2012 — by
Category Spotify

Are your running a site or blog? I have got good news for you. Spotify has launched a web widget that allows instant access to songs, albums and playlists. Isn’t that great? You can now publish your very own playlists on your website. Here is an example, one of my favorite playlists: Originals that are less famous than the cover versions.

 Of course you can also use the widget for single songs or an album. Creating the widget is easy. Just head on over to https://developer.spotify.com/technologies/spotify-play-button enter the Spotify URI of the song, album or playlist, pick the desired size and style and copy the embed code to your site or blog.

One little thing though, if you want to listen, you have to have Spotify installed.

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Meet Clementine, an alternative client for Spotify

0
Posted 10 Apr 2012 — by
Category Spotify

Clementine is a multi platform music player for Spotify, your local files, Grooveshark, Last.fm, SomaFM, Magnatune, Jamendo, SKY.fm  Digitally Imported and Icecast.

You can create playlists combining songs from different services and your local files. And how about the song info? If you have a Last.fm account you can tell the number of plays and you get the lyrics.

Nice client to play around with. Spotify Premium account needed.

Available for Windows, Linux en MacOS on www.clementine-player.org

 

 

 

 

 

Finally An iPad App For Spotify!

0
Posted 06 Apr 2012 — by
Category Apps, Spotify

Something millions of Spotify users have been waiting for. A Spotify App for the iPad. Good news, it is there. The app is called Spotable. Not made by Spotify, but by The Famous Software Company using the Spotify API.

But who cares, it works and it looks a whole lot better than the iPhone app on your iPad

The app has most of the Spotify basic functions and it sure is nice to browse collections and even read the artist bio while listening.

It is not 100% perfect yet, you cannot create playlists and there is no connection with your Facebook friends (should you miss this). But for the rest most features are there including off-line syncing.

Now let’s wait and see if Spotify can top this.

You need a Spotify Premium subscription of course but Spotable is available for free in your local iTunes App Store.

 

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Indie Artist Makes $20,000 From Streaming In One Month

1
Posted 03 Apr 2012 — by
Category Pay outs

A few days ago I had a discussion with @medtek and @MrCrimson about the pay out by streaming services.

The average pay out per stream turned out to be $0.0048, so about 200 streams should be enough to equal the revenue of an iTunes sale.

You can read the entire discussion here.

Seems few people understand that streams can provide a decent income because the threshold for having a listen is far lower than for buying a song. You just cannot compare streams with sales. Apples and oranges…

This morning I a got a tweet from Chris Duncan who pointed me to the article he had published about a popular Swedish artist called Jonathan Johansson. This guy made more than $20,000 from streaming services alone in the first month of his album being available. Read the full story.
Too bad the original article ( in Danish) is behind a pay wall.in the meantime. If anyone has a copy, screenshot whatever, please contact me. To show that this is for real. Here is a tweet by the Danish collective rights management society Koda:

Translation: In little over a month  Jonathan Johansson earned 200,000 Swedish kroner on streams of his new album, Borsen today #.

So can you all now please stop referring to the Lady Gaga pay out and the outdated Information is Beautiful graph? Jonathan Johansson makes serious money from streaming in the relatively small Scandinavian market. What will happen if streaming gets popular in a way bigger market like the US?

12 New Spotify Apps

0
Posted 23 Mar 2012 — by
Category Uncategorized

This week Spotify released a new batch of apps:

  • Classify — focuses on classical music and makes it easy for users to browse by composer, era, mood, instrument and genre.
  • The Complete Collection — Allows users to browse liner notes and booklets while listening to artists. 150 booklets will be available at launch with more coming soon
  • Filtr — Lets users build playlists based on the musical tastes of their Facebook friends
  • TweetVine — Monitors the #NowPlaying hashtag on Twitter and creates Spotify charts with the results
  • Digster — match Digster playlists to your listening history and Facebook likes, then turn on full screen mode for partying.
  • Hot or Not — It’s battle of the song — and users can choose what song is more popular, or what song should be.
  • The Legacy Of — Combines acclaimed artists with hi-res photos, biographies and curated playlists. It includes catalogs from Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Hall & Oates and more.
  • The Warner Sound — Features albums, songs and playlists from Warner Music Group’s roster — as well as genre-specific playlists, album of the day and artist-curated playlists
  • Matador — Gives users access to new releases, tour dates and playlists for Matador artists, as well as an interactive history of the label going back to its founding in 1992.
  • Def Jam — The Def Jam app features a mix of curated playlists from across the labels 26-year history.
  • Domino — This app is intended to highlight music from Domino artists and the broader indie music community as a whole.
  • [PIAS] — Features new curated playlists from the [PIAS] label, updated on a weekly basis.

The Complete Collection looks like a dream com true: finally you have access to booklets of the albums. But the number of collections is rather limited and the booklets are presented in a small window, what makes them hard to read. You need to magnify the text for it. Filtr is a nice idea, playlists based on what your Facebook friends are playing, but you probably already know what they listen to because of what you saw on Facebook. Tweetvine shows songs mentioned on Twitter, but you can’t tell who tweeted the songs and what was added as comment, like with my own little project Songtweets

To be honest most of these new apps are somewhat disappointing. Many of them are are powered by the record labels and distributors an don’t offer exiting features like with the first batch of apps.

I have seen much more interesting apps in the making over the past few months. Let’s hope apps like The Music Maze or Artist Picture Show are part of the next batch.